Qualcomm prepping speedy dual-core Snapdragon chip for Q4 2010

Qualcomm, one of the leading silicon makers for mobile devices, announced Monday that it will have a dual-core Snapdragon chip ready by the fourth quarter of this year. Boasting speed and power efficiency, the new chip should find its way inside high-end smartphones, tablets, and low-cost laptops.

The silicon, labeled QSD8672, the successor to the popular Snapdragon QSD8660 chip, sports two processing cores based on ARM’s CPU design and will be produced using the 45-nanometer process. It boasts more power efficient performance, clock speeds up to 1.5GHz (a notable increase over the QSD8660 chip which tops out at 1.2 GHz), the ability to clock each core independently based on system load, 1080p video playback, and integrated HDMI and DDR2/DDR3 memory interfaces.

Mark Frankel, Qualcomm’s vice president of product management for CDMA technologies, expects the first products based on the new chip by this Christmas. Motorola’s Droid X and Droid 2 are said to be powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon silicon so Android fans should expect even more powerful smartphones on the market soon. The Snapdragon chip is found on high-end smartphones like HTC’s Evo and HD2, Google’s Nexus One, and Sony Ericsson’s Xperia X10, but also in tablets like the Dell Streak, and cheap notebooks.